-011_The Body Human

THE human frame is a miracle of creation. It would not be far wrong to say that the whole trend of physical evolution has been to bring out this morphological marvel. It has not been a very easy task for Nature to raise a living creature from its original crawling "crouching slouching" horizontal position to the standing vertical position which is so normal and natural to the human body. Man has proportionately a larger cranium with a greater and heavier content of the grey substance in comparison with the (vertebral) column upon which it is set, his legs too have to carry a heavier burden. And yet how easy and graceful his erect posture! It is a balancing feat worthy of the cleverest rope-dancer. Look at a bear or even at a chimpanzee standing and moving on its hind legs; what an uncouth, ungainly gait, forced and ill at ease! He is more natural and at home in the prone horizontal position. The bird was perhaps an attempt at change of position from the horizontal to the vertical: the frame here attained an angular incline (cf. tiryak, as the bird is called in Sanskrit), but to maintain even that position it was not possible to increase or enlarge the head. It is not idly that Hamlet exclaims:

What a piece of work is a man!... how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable!... the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!¹

   The perfection of the anatomical and morphological structure in man consists precisely in its wonderful elasticity – the 'infinite faculty' or multiple functioning referred to by Shakespeare. This is the very characteristic character of man both with regard to his physical and psychological make-up. The

 ¹ Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. 2

other species are, everyone of them, more or less, a specialised formation; we have there a closed system, a fixed and definite physical mould and pattern of life. A cat or a crow of a millioI1years ago, like 'the immemorial elm' was not very different from its descendant of today; not so with man. I mean, the human frame, in its general build, might have remained the: same from the beginning of time, but the uses to which it has been put, the works that have been demanded of it are multifarious, indeed of infinite variety. Although it is sometimes stated that the human body too has undergone a change (and is still undergoing) from what was once heavy and muscular, tall and stalwart, with a thicker skeletal system, towards something lighter and more delicate. Also an animal, like the plant, because of its rigidity of pattern, remains unchanged, keeping to its own geographical habitat. Change of climate meant for the animal a considerable change, a sea-change, a change of species, practically. But man can easily – much more easily than an animal or a plant – acclimatise himself to all sorts of variable climates. There seems to be a greater resilience in his physical system, even as a physical object. Perhaps it contains a greater variety of component elements and centres of energy which support its versatile action. The human frame, one may say, is like the solar spectrum that contains. all the colour vibrations and all the lines characteristic of the different elements. The solar sphere is the high symbol for man.

The story runs (Aitareya Upanishad) that once the gods wished to come down and inhabit an earthly frame. Several animal forms (the cow, the horse) were presented to them one after another, but they were not satisfied, none was considered adequate for their habitation. At last the human frame (with its conscious personality) was offered to them and immediately they declared that that was indeed the perfect form they needed – sukrtam bateti – and they entered into it.

The human frame is the abode of the gods; it is a temple of God, as we all know. But the most significant thing about it is that the gods alone do not dwell there: all being, all creatures crowd there, even the ungodly and the undivine. The Pashu (the animal), the Pishacha (the demon), theAsura (the Titan), and the Deva (the god), all find comfortable lodging in it – there are many chambers indeed in this mansion 

of the Lord. Man was made after the image of God and yet Lucifer had access into that tabernacle and all his entire host with him. This duality of the divine and the undivine, the characteristic mark of human nature as it is, presents a field and a labour through which man's progress has to be worked out. The soul, the divine flame, has, been placed in Ignorance, that is to say, what is apparent Ignorance, the frame of Matter, just because this Matter in Ignorance is to be smelted, purified, given its original and intrinsic substance, shape and character. The human person in its actual form is not obviously something absolutely perfect and divine. The type, the norm it represents is divine, but it has been overlaid with all obscure and base elements – it has to be washed and cleaned thoroughly, smelted and reconditioned. The dark ungodly elements mar and vitiate; they must be removed on the one hand, but on the other, they point out and test the salvaging work that has to be done and is being done. Man is always at the crossroads. This is his especial difficulty and this is also his unique opportunity. His consciousness has a double valency, in contradistinction to the animal's which is, it can be said, monovalent, in that it is amoral, has not the sense of divided loyalty and hence the merit of choice. The movements of the animal follow a fixed stereotyped pattern; it has not got to deviate from the beaten track of its instincts. But man with his sense of the moral, of the good, of the progressive is at every step of his life faced with a dilemma, has to pause at a parting of the ways, always looks before and after and is puzzled at a cas de conscience. That, we have said, has been made for him the condition of growth, of a conscious and willed change with an ever-increasing tempo towards perfect perfection. That furnishes the occasion and circumstance by which he rises to divinity itself, becomes the Divine. He becomes the Divine thus not merely in the own home of the Divine, but on all the levels of the manifestation: all the planes of consciousness with all the hierarchy of beings – powers and personalities – find a new play of harmony, a supreme and global fulfilment in the transfigured human vehicle. The frame itself that encases the human consciousness acts as a living condenser: the very contour in its definiteness seems to exert a pressure towards an ever larger and higher synthesis, it may be 

compared to a kind of field office (Einsteinian, for example) that controls, regulates, moves and configurates all elements within its range. The human frame even as a frame possesses a magic virtue.

Vaishnavism sees the Divine as a human person, the human person par excellence. Krishna's body is a radiant form of consciousness (cinmaya), no doubt, but it is as definite, determinate, and concrete as the physical body, it is the physical itself but in its true substance. And its exquisiteness consists in its being human in form. The Vedantin's Maya does not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For they say Goloka stands above Brahmaloka.

The Christian conception of God-man is also extremely beautiful and full of meaning. God became man: He sent down upon earth his own and only Son to live among men as man. This indeed is His supreme Grace, His illimitable love for mankind. It is thus, in the words of the Offertory, that He miraculously created the dignity of human substance, holding Himself worthy to partake of our humanity. This carnal sinful body has been sanctified by the Christ having assumed it. In and through Him – his divine consciousness – it has been strained and purified, uplifted and redeemed. He has anointed it and given it a place in Heaven even by the side of the Father. Again, Mary – symbolising the earth or body consciousness, as Christian mystics themselves declare – was herself taken up bodily into the heavenly abode. The body celestial is this very physical human body cleared of its dross and filled with the divine substance. This could have been so precisely because it was originally the projection, the very image of God here below in the world of Matter. The mystery of Transubstantiation repeats and confirms the same symbology. The bread and wine of our secular body become the flesh and blood of the God-Man's body. The human frame is, as it were, woven into the very fabric of God's own truth and substance. The human form is inherent in the Divine's own personality. Is it mere anthropomorphism to say like this? We know the adage that the lion were he self-conscious and creative, would paint God as a super-lion, that is to say, in his own image. Well, the difference is precisely here, that the lion is not self-conscious and creative. Man creates – not man the mere imaginative 

artist but man the seer, the Rishi – he expresses and embodies, represents faithfully the truth that he sees, the truth that he is. It is because of this "conscious personality", referred to in the parable of the Aitareya Upanishad,-that God has chosen the human form to inhabit.

This is man's great privilege that, unlike the animal, he can surpass himself (the capacity, we may note, upon which the whole Nietzschean conception of humanity was based). Man is not bound to his human nature, to his anthropomorphism, he can rise above and beyond it, become what is (apparently) non-human. Therefore the Gita teaches: By thy self upraise thy self, lower not thy self by thy self. Indeed, as we have said, man means the whole gamut of existence. All the worlds and all the beings in all the worlds are also within his frame; he has only to switch or focus his consciousness on to a particular point or direction and he becomes a particular type in life. Man can be the very supreme godhead or at the other extreme a mere brute or any other intermediary creature in the hierarchy extending between the two.

The Divine means the All: whatever there is (manifest or beyond) is within Him and is Himself. Man too who is within that Divine is the Divine in a special way; for he is a replica or epitome of the Divine containing or embodying the threefold status and movement of the Divine – the Transcendent, the Cosmic and the Individual. He is co-extensive with the Divine. Only, the Divine is conscious, supremely conscious, while Man is unconscious or at best half-conscious. God has made himself the world and its creatures, the transcendental has become the material cosmos, true; but God has made himself Man in a special sense and for a special purpose. Man is not a fabrication of the Lower Maya, a formation thrown up in the evolutionary course by a temporary idea in the Cosmic Mind and developed through the play of forces; on the other hand, it is a typal reality, a Real-Idea – a formation of the original truth-consciousness, the Divine's own transcendental existence. Man is the figure of the Divine Person. The Impersonal become or viewed as the Personal takes up the human aspect, the human, that is to say, as its original prototype in the superconscience.

The conception of a personal immortality – the impersonal 

is naturally always immortal, there is no problem there – of a physical immortality even attains a significant value looked at from this standpoint. The urge for immortality is not merely a wish to continue indefinitely an earthly life, because of its pleasures or because of an unreasoning attachment; it means regaining and establishing the immortal body that one has or that one is essentially and potentially. The body seeks to be immortal, for it contains and secretly is its immortal Formal Cause (to make use of an Aristotelian term). The materialisation of an immortal being and figure of being – that is the consummation demanded of human life on earth.

The spirit, the pure self in man is formless; but his soul – the spirit cast into the evolutionary mould in manifestation – has a form: it possesses a personal identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an image – a faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life, – of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its evolutionary march through terrestrial life. A mystic poet says:

All dreams of the soul

End in a beautiful man's or woman's body¹

This is not the utterance of a mere profane consciousness; such also is the experience of a deeper spiritual truth. For the Divine in one of its essential aspects is Ardhanarishwara, the original transcendental Man-Woman. And we feel and almost see that it is a human Face to which our adoration goes when we hear another mystic poet chant for us the mantra:

Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.²

¹W. B. Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon", The Wild Swans at Cook

 ² Sri Aurobindo, "The Bird of Fire", Collected Poems & Ploys